Having stumped one nice fellow on #rubyonrails, I inflict this on you all:

I can make a new object, which is then empty. Sure. I run a method to populate the fields which runs fine and debug out some correctfield data. Inspecting or printing the method shows it is still empty, but if I ask politely the data is there (accessors and to_string). But. When I ask it to save the data, it writes out all NULLS, which is wrong and also causes the DB to throw back an error (since some of those fields are Not Null in the schema). Elipsises mine to cut down on the number of times you need to read nil and NULL.

ETA: Trying out the scaffold views shows that they really don't work right either... tried and fix some of that (self.id="id") to see if it helps. This also may indicate further misalignment of gnats and crumbs in the sqlite3 RAILS_ENV=test. Also my joins may not be right, although I'm not using them anywhere that I know of. sqlite returns data when I "select * from yen_orders" but rails scaffold just shows buttons or polite nothing...

Can you post up some of the view, controller, and model code for the parts in question? It'll help with identifying where the problem is.

First thing that should be done to stop ActiveRecord from spitting out the error is to include some validates presence of statements in the model. Also, the fact that to_s is working means that whatever is defined in the to_s method is working, and in this example it looks like the only thing showing is maybe the first or last name and the objects temporary id.

How is the model defined? It looks like there is an issue with the scripts that are assigning the values to the accessors or the column names in he params hash. I can't really say without seeing the rest of the code from the view and the controller. Make sure that the column names are all reflected accurately in the params and the scripts assigning the data. If you aren't using the form_for method in the view, I recommend using it.

That's all I put into the to_s to keep it short. The attr_readers for two fields also work, although it may not be clear in that snip. There's very little code outside of the model, which was created with generate scaffold. The view and controller are blank. If you want to see more the whole mess is in SVN: https://dev.atlbbs.com/svn/atlbbs/moocash/

Looks like your scripts to run your assemble data script aren't running because your redefinition of the initialize method has not been uncommented out to allow it to run. So uncomment out the initialize method and all should work fine.